I finally bit the bullet and shelled out the moolah for a PS5 this year after years of stating that I would only do so once my PS4 died. Well that all changed when me and my brother were attempting to play a multi-player game that wasn't functioning very well because he was on a PS5 and I was on a PS4. I've had the money for quite some time but I don't like to waste money. Now I have both the 4 and 5 sitting side by side in my living room with a Nitendo Switch docking station sat on top of the PS4.
I've been quite pleased with my purchase of the PS5 although it is kind of ironic that myself, my brother, and two other friends lost interest in the multiplayer game that we were playing within a week of me getting the PS5. We have all been searching for a game that we could play together ever since.
I have been digging because the games that we have enjoyed in the past have almost exclusively been ARPG's or something similar to that. Games we have enjoyed have been various but for the most part the ones that come to mind are Warhammer: Chaosbane and Alienation. We played both of those until none of us were really interested anymore and it was for different reasons why we stopped. With Chaosbane it was because once you get all the green gear and have defeated the various levels over and over again there honestly isn't much reason to continue playing them. In Alienation the reasons were similar but honestly, it held its value a great deal better than Chaosbane did despite the fact that the levels in Alienation were the same ever time you played them whereas Choasbane was procedurally generated.
I think I am more of an old-school gamer so I tend to look at games that are a bit older when contemplating a purchase. My brother, who is also in his 40's tends to think the same way. We are not early adopters of games and rarely jump on the bandwagon of whatever was just released. This has multiple benefits in that you can't be duped by a marketing campaign or the corrupt review system that exists with sites like IGN that appear to be compromised by affiliation with AAA studios.
Anyway, I recently encountered a problem with the PS5 when I was trying to get my hands on an older game that was available on the PS4.
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While I didn't read into it massively, I was under the impression that my PS5 would be capable of playing all the PS4 library as well. I can't begin to understand how backwards compatibility works but I am sure it is quite complicated. I'm also sure that it is possible and always has been and I think back to the adaptors that I used to have on my older systems that if they hadn't existed I likely would have never played any Sega Master System games
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I believe this gadget was $19.99 and that was fantastic considering that the old games were extremely cheap at the time
We are in a different time now though and most people get their games in purely digital form which can be nice because you have access to literally everything all at once. Like many people I prefer a physical copy of the game but the availability of them becomes more and more scarce as the push to digital only keeps going.
Well the other day we were in a Telegram group, just the 4 of us that game together online, and someone came up with an ARPG that they enjoyed that was casual enough for us to enjoy that is called Torchlight 2. I had played this at some point on a PC and also had fond memories of it and thought it could be a lot of fun for us to play that together.
I figured that since it is so old that we would be able to pick it up for just a few dollars if it wasn't simply free to play at this point.
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It wasn't as cheap as I wanted it to be but I did like that they had a demo for the grand price of nada. I told everyone in the group and then one of the people pointed out that the purchase price for the full game was "not available for purchase." We went to go and download the demo anyway and if we liked it enough we would try to figure out how to get the full game when the time came.
Well for 3 of us, it wouldn't allow the download of the demo at all either. One guy, me, was able to download it and none of us could figure out why. We would later find out what the apparent reason for this is.
I was able to download the demo because of the fact, and I am totally guessing here based on our unique situation, that it let me download it because my PS Plus account was set up on a PS4 and then transferred to the PS5, everyone else in my little group set up their account on a PS5 for the first time.
It appears as though it is not allowing them to download the game because it doesn't work on the PS5. It only works on the PS4. I'm not saying that this is definitely true but when I go into my library on the PS5, Torchlight doesn't even appear in the library. Since my PS4 is sitting directly next to my PS5 I fired that up and voila! There Torchlight was in my library. Apparently, this game is not backwards compatible for the PS5 and this is disappointing because I purchased this upgraded system for many reasons but one of them was the ability to play all my older games on the new system, which apparently isn't possible.
You can see there that there is no picture of PS5 in the sale section.
So I am a bit confused. Sony gave me the impression that all of these games would work on the PS5 but apparently they do not. I'm not going to complain about this too much because I am overall quite pleased with my new system for the diminished load-times alone, but I feel a bit duped by this because it was explicitly stated that the system WAS backwards compatible. I suppose there must have been some asterisks that I missed next to that particular promise. Perhaps it only applied to games that Sony themselves made?
So this is something to keep in mind for people out there that are late bloomers as far as getting involved in buying a PS5 is concerned. If you have a massive catelogue of games on your PS4, there is a chance that many of those games wont actually work on your new system. I don't know if there is a database out there of games where this is the case, but if someone out there knows of one, I would appreciate you sending it my way.